New ToDo.txt Touch iOS App Screenshots and first impressions

Today I was sorting through some past articles to share on Twitter and came across my review of the recently developed ToDo.txt. back in Feb 2011. I wanted to see if the project was still running and whether my links were working, and lo and behold there is a fresh update! It looks like only a couple of days ago they released the iOS version!

I am such a sucker for new apps like this, so I went and grabbed my iPhone and went over to the App Store. There it was, $1.99!

Many of you know that I am a diehard Remember the Milk user, and I really don’t need this app, but I went and bought it anyway…It was more like I gave my coffee money for the day to the developer. I try to support developers whenever I can, and grass-roots, open source projects deserve more support from users! So go buy more open source apps while it’s fresh on your mind…

Anyhow, Todo.txt was developed to merge the simplicity of a plain text list with the mobiliity people are looking for in today’s mobile devices. How they do it is they link to your Dropbox account. You simply create a todo.txt(obvious…) file and place it in your Dropbox account. I found that it wanted to nest the file in a folder called ‘todo’.

You can also open it up from within Dropbox to see it as a read-only file.

The power of the iOS app is the ability to use the search function that is hidden at the top of the app. That way you can sort out your tasks based on Priority, Project, keyword, etc…

On my laptop, I can open up Terminal within Dropbox and use VI to update or add to the list. The developer does offer a shell script to sort, list, complete, and organize your ToDo list that makes using a large text file a lot easier to work with. That is as long as you remember what you are looking for! My complaint from last year…

Having played with ToDo.txt Touch for a few hours, I like it. For me though, it is unfortunately not going to develop past playing I’m afraid.

Having all my tasks in one master text file that I have to use search features to simplify seems so unproductive…Yes, it is cool to use the ‘power’ of the command line to find your tasks, but it seems much more like an exercise than an easy to scroll ToDo list.

Looking currently in my Remember the Milk account I have 130 outstanding tasks. Can you imagine what that would look like in ToDo.txt?

I’m happy to spend the $1.99 to encourage more grass roots development like this, but I’m off to my RTM account and getting back to work…